Lajos Takacs

Lajos Takacs, whose work has been a source of ideas and solutions for applied probabilists in operations research for more than 40 years, was awarded the 1994 John von Neumann Theory Prize.

The prize, a joint award from ORSA and TIMS, was presented by Daniel Heyman at the awards luncheon during recent TIMS/ORSA Joint National Meeting in Boston. Heyman noted Takacs' profound and seminal contributions to queueing theory, particularly two early papers that had an extraordinary impact on the subject area.

His 1953 paper, "Some Investigations Concerning Recurrent Stochastic Processes of a Certain Kind," is one of the seminal papers introducing semi-Markov processes,' Heyman said, reading from the citation. "His 1954 paper, 'Investigations of Waiting Time Problems by Reduction to Markov Processes,' contains several monumental results: the distributions of the lengths of the busy period, and of the number of customers served in it, for the single server queue with Poisson arrivals; the introduction of the notion of virtual delay of a queueing system; and the derivation and the solution of what is now called Takacs integro-differential equation for virtual delay.

Takacs is the author of Introduction to the Theory of Queues, published in 1962, and Combinatorial Methods in the Theory of Stochastic Processes, published in 1967.